Surviving Beyond the Zombie Apocalypse

by Jeffrey Littorno

  The door had opened into some sort of small office, which was now flooded with darkness. In fact, the bright light from the hospital corridor seemed unable or unwilling to pierce the deep darkness waiting beyond the doorway.

  Mike stood in what seemed like the relative safety of the light as he peered into the thick black of the office. Whether real or imagined, there seemed to be movement within the dark. No sound escaped the inky blackness.

  Despite the strangeness of the situation, Mike did his best to remain grounded in the logical world.

  Unsure what else to do, he timidly called, “Doctor Dixon, uh, doctor, it’s Mike Gallagher.”

  He waited anxiously at the door for some response as he tried to make out the shapes moving within the darkness. The teacher strained his eyes but somehow the shapes remained just out of his clear vision. He crept closer to the doorway and the line dividing light from dark. Mike’s body tensed at every muscle as he moved just beyond the light.

  “Doctor, are you in here?”

  Instantly, Mike felt as though all of the air had been sucked out of the room, leaving everything absolutely still. In the next moment, the place exploded with a force that blew Mike backward into the wall across the hallway.

  He slid to the floor and lie there stunned for a few seconds. The next thing he saw was a woman’s face staring down at him. The long brown hair hung down toward Mike, forming a sort of tunnel to her face. He looked up at the face and thought that it looked familiar although he could not remember why. The face hovering above him in that hair tunnel appeared to be a long distance away and the neutral expression upon it gave no clue as to the reason for its presence.

  “I was just looking for Doctor Dixon,” Mike stammered.

  The words captured the gaze of the eyes on the face although the expression did not change and showed no signs of understanding Mike’s statement.

  The expression finally changed to a half smile and an instant later the face was close enough for Mike to smell something like spoiled meat on the woman’s breath.

  “The doctor is out,” she whispered before biting into the teacher’s nose and cheek.

  Mike felt the warm blood streaming down his face and tried to reach up to wipe it away. Something was preventing his hands from moving, and he looked to find out what that was. The sight of the canvass cuffs tethering his hands to the bed railing knocked him back and out of the hallway back to his room.

  He pulled his arms, trying to break out of the cuffs. The shock of finding himself restrained once again sent fury racing through his body. The image of the face hovering at the end of the tunnel sent a wave of fear to join the fury he was experiencing.

  Mike’s efforts to escape his bondage grew more intense, and he began screaming. The railings shook but did not release him.

  He was thrashing from side to side when the first nurse rushed into the room. “Mr. Gallagher, you just need to calm down! Please, you’re going to injure yourself.” The nurse leaned over to hold Mike’s arm. In the next moment, she was knocked back from the bed with a bruised lip. The big black orderly that had been in the room previously quickly pinned Mike down.

  “Okay, let’s get this blood cleaned up,” the nurse said, lifting herself off the floor. A pair of nurses who had been standing in the doorway watching moved next to the bed and wiped the blood off of Mike’s face.

  The nurse who had been knocked back from the bed came to the railing and looked down at him. Mike saw her name tag read “Nurse Tiller” followed by a series of letter that meant nothing to him. He expected her to be angry at him for having knocked her back against the wall, but the solid-looking woman simply looked at him and shook her head. “Mister Gallagher, I sure didn’t figure you for somebody who’d give me a hard time.”

  “I am really sorry,” Mike started to apologize, but Tiller cut him off.

  “Mister Gallagher, I have been a nurse here at Sac Memorial for nearly thirty years now. I don’t need apologies from patients. All I ask is that you do as directed by me and my nursing staff.”

  As would be the case with any English teacher, Mike had trouble not offering Nurse Tiller a grammar correction. Fortunately, he controlled the impulse and instead said, “I will certainly do that.”

  Tiller responded with a forced smile and said, “Well then, hon, we should get along just fine.” She picked up a gauze pack from the counter and started to clean Mike’s face. “Now why in the world did you want to go and bloody up your pretty face like this.”

  The image of the woman biting to his face and moving away with the bloody chunk of his nose still between her teeth flashed in front of his eyes. However, it had already taken on the aspect of something seen in a movie or on television rather than something in which he had been involved.

  “What? You think I did all this to myself?” Mike started to protest.

  Nurse Tiller chuckled and then laughed loudly. “Well, since you’re the only body in range and there’s blood on the rail here, I’d have to say yeah. But if you got a good story to tell me, I’d love to hear it.”

  Mike glanced over to see the red smudges on the shiny silver rail and said nothing. He slowly lowered his head back onto the pillow and closed his eyes.

  The sounds of the hospital hummed in his ears for a few seconds until every bit of attention was grabbed by the face moving down from the ceiling.

  His mouth opened as if ready to scream, but what erupted from him was not a shriek. Mike began laughing. The sound began as soft giggles and grew into an explosion of guffaws. The reaction seemed to surprise Mike himself, but he was unable to keep the tremors from rolling through his body. The laughter grew until sounded hysterical. Through it all, he stared up into the face floating down from above. All at once, he recognized the woman.

  “Mike, you need to wake up,” she said.

  The words sent him into another fit of laughter that shook his entire body. Whether it was from simply the laughing seizure or the terror of the approaching woman, he felt rattled to the core. Still, he was not able to stop laughing. He gasped for breath but could not find it.

  Through the ripples above and around him, Mike looked at the doctor’s face. She looked very concerned, and he wondered at the notion that she could be so concerned for him. The idea nearly brought a smile to his face and probably would have if he had not been shaken roughly.

  “I know who she is,” Mike cried out as soon as he was able.

  Doctor Dixon and the few others in the room looked at him with curiosity.

  Before they could comment, he continued, “The woman who tried to kill me in…in what, I guess, was a dream…she’s the same woman who passed me on the freeway.”

  The expressions of confusion had now become looks of complete incredulity.

  “Mike, you’re still recovering from a serious head trauma. The only thing you should be doing right now is getting plenty of rest,” Dixon offered him a bottle of drinking water from which drank a good portion.

  Mike’s mother joined the doctor at his bedside and said, “Honey, you need to listen to Doctor Dixon. She only wants what’s best for you, we all do.”

  He couldn’t help but smile at this, but it made him feel a bit guilty as well. Mike had never wanted to be the reason for others to worry. Even as a teenager when others his age were involved in all range of questionable activities, Gallagher had never been in much trouble. Of course, that’s not to say there weren’t the occasional late night parties and backseat antics, but any infractions were very minor and corrected with a slight scolding. However, that exemplary behavior was probably as much an avoidance of attention as it was an avoidance of discipline or punishment.

  “I don’t want anyone worry about me,” Mike protested. “But I know who the woman who tried to kill me is!” He expected his announcement to be greeted with at least some happiness, but only silence and blank stares provided a response.

  After an awkward few seconds, his mother said, “But no one tried to kill you, honey.
The police said the whole things was just a terrible accident that killed a woman…but not my son.” She could not control her tears with the last few words.

  Mike did his best to move close enough to give her an awkward hug. Even as he was doing this, he managed to make eye contact with Lana Dixon. It was clear from their exchange that some sort of bond had formed between them over a short period of time. The strong concern was also evident in the doctor’s eyes.